


Watching History

by PurpleMoon3



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types, Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 15:33:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17185658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleMoon3/pseuds/PurpleMoon3
Summary: Those who make history, and those who record it.





	Watching History

**Author's Note:**

> For the [Prompt:Any, any, hollow books hiding secrets.](https://comment-fic.livejournal.com/969832.html?thread=110116712#t110116712)

It's a stupid sentiment, maybe, but they share a history 

-he ignores the ghostly chuckle of _historians_ from a dead man, a man that he should have gotten to know better than the trio of assassin ancestors he could write goddamn door stopper biographies for but there was never time- 

and he can't find it in him to let the woman go unremarked, unremembered. This, he thinks, is why he hates Abstergo.

– _Templars_ the dead man growls, just behind his head, in a voice filled with danger and a foreign tone. _Borgia_.- 

Shaun knows why he was in the alley. He was taking the fire escape to the roof, because it made sense, because for all that he sat at a desk he was still an Assassin. He choose to be an Assassin. He knew the risks. He doesn't know why she was there. A ghostly blip on his radar, red haired dyed mousy brown yet grayed out all the same as an unimportant, non-threat. Green eyes. He remembered she had green eyes, with a hazel ring around the pupil. He remembered because he'd developed a small crush on her when they'd taken opposite sides in morality debate over James the First, though she'd insisted on naming him James the Sixth, and the impact of his Daemonologie. He didn't know why she was there, so far from home, from her work in Paris. He'd been happy, and jealous, when she'd gotten the recruitment offer.

Not a lot of well paying positions for historians in the public or private sector. Well, not a lot both well paying and full time. Case in point: himself.

Clear as a bell, he remembers her voice, a startled query cut off by a bullet that was impossibly loud despite the silencer, and the shattering of glass as a camera hit pavement. He remembers his own surprise at the sound causing his body to still and land badly on the next roof. 

-The dead man paces at his back, a stalking wolf, glazed eyes gleaming with queer light. _Stay thy blade from the flesh of the innocent._ -

She wasn't a threat. They'd killed her anyway, the tunnel vision of the Templars blocking out common sense as much as critical thinking, and because they'd had to pause and break up their search team to dispose of the body he'd been able to get away. To pull the dead man's hood around his face and _hide in plain sight._

Where but for the grace of 'Becca, he would have been her. Dead, and the bottom of a river, wrists slit postmortem and forgotten. 

But, that wasn't what Assassin's did. It wasn't what historians did. 

-Hands, pale with death when they once blushed in life, guide his own as quick as anything. _Who are we,_ the dead man whispers with wonder, _who have been so blessed to share our stories like this? To speak across centuries?_ -

And so the door opens. A spartan apartment greets him, little more than a cave with a view so perfect a n expensive, professional camera is still set up in the window. Pictures line the wall, hung up like clothes to dry, all of the same person. A young man, different clothes for different days, eating in cafes and riding a motorbike. He feeds ducks. He polishes a sword. He hot wires a Fiat.

More pictures, and despite the blur, he's seen enough fights in the animus to know it isn't a tournament match going on but a full on duel to the death.

It sends a shiver up his spine.

There's a mattress on the floor, and lack of pillows but a very suggestive laptop sleeping in pride of place. A painfully nostalgic stack of books spills across bedding the carpet. He goes and sits, springs creaking, but when he unfolds the device there's nothing. An operating system, yes, but no document folders, no internet connection, no games, and even the basic email program is void of a contact list he can use to let her mother know where to find the body.

-Dead fingers press against his eyes, push in with impossibly hot pressure, and the world crackles into focus.-

Shaun swallows back ineffective rage and looks at the pile of novels, of notebooks, and in the weak lamplight one looks... brighter. Old pages yellow

-Golden. _Important_.-

with age and a thick leather binding call to him. He picks it up, appreciating the texture, to dark imprint of a symbol he doesn't recognize by sight but weight. A branching shape, like a tree, or a minimalist bird, bordered all around with evenly spaced bumps. It feels important, like the Assassins' lambda or the Templars' cross. 

The book itself, though, isn't nearly heavy enough. 

Leather bindings crack, though the pages don't shift a bit, and an external hard drive stares up from its hiding spot.

When Shaun plugs it in to the laptop the whole computer changes, screen blanking, before the symbol that was on the false book appears against the black background with a notification of unopened mail. There is a text document written as though its part diary, part zoologist field journal. There's a file simply titled _Challenge Record_ with a list of dates and times for decapitations going back all the way to 1256.

Later, much later, after a baby Isu presses a sword to his neck and Rebecca has gotten the go-ahead from Bill, he takes the laptop and walks into a bar. Glass bottles gleam in the low light and as a sharp eyes peer at him as the proprietor polishes a glass. Shaun clears his throat. Smoke drifts, second hand like an inescapable incense, through the room.

- _Safety and peace._ The dead man murmurers in sleepy contentment as recipes for drinks drift through his awareness like clouds in the sky.-

“Senior Watcher Dawson?”


End file.
